Chapter 6

Miss Louisa, at home in the dingy vicarage, had suffered a great
deal over her sister's wedding. Having once begun to cry out
against it, during the engagement, she had been silenced by Mary's
quiet: "I don't agree with you about him, Louisa, I WANT to marry
him." Then Miss Louisa had been angry deep in her heart, and
therefore silent. This dangerous state started the change in her.
Her own revulsion made her recoil from the hitherto undoubted Mary.

But evidently Mary could perform a different heroism. So she,
Louisa the practical, suddenly felt that Mary, her ideal, was
questionable after all. How could she be pure - one cannot be dirty
in act and spiritual in being. Louisa distrusted Mary's high
spirituality. It was no longer genuine for her. And if Mary were
spiritual and misguided, why did not her father protect her?
Because of the money. He disliked the whole affair, but he backed
away, because of the money. And the mother frankly did not care:
her daughters could do as they liked. Her mother's pronouncement:

"Whatever happens to HIM, Mary is safe for life," - so evidently and
shallowly a calculation, incensed Louisa.

"I'd rather be safe in the workhouse," she cried.

"Your father will see to that," replied her mother brutally. This
speech, in its indirectness, so injured Miss Louisa that she hated
her mother deep, deep in her heart, and almost hated herself. It
was a long time resolving itself out, this hate. But it worked and
worked, and at last the young woman said:

"They are wrong - they are all wrong. They have ground out their
souls for what isn't worth anything, and there isn't a grain of
love in them anywhere. And I WILL have love. They want us to deny
it. They've never found it, so they want to say it doesn't exist.
But I WILL have it. I WILL love - it is my birthright. I will love
the man I marry - that is all I care about."

So Miss Louisa stood isolated from everybody. She and Mary had
parted over Mr Massy. In Louisa's eyes, Mary was degraded, married
to Mr Massy. She could not bear to think of her lofty, spiritual
sister degraded in the body like this. Mary was wrong, wrong,
wrong: she was not superior, she was flawed, incomplete. The two
sisters stood apart. They still loved each other, they would love
each other as long as they lived. But they had parted ways. A new
solitariness came over the obstinate Louisa, and her heavy jaw set
stubbornly. She was going on her own way. But which way? She was
quite alone, with a blank world before her. How could she be said
to have any way? Yet she had her fixed will to love, to have the
man she loved.